Having clear company values helps you ensure that all your employees are working towards the same goals. Your core values support the company’s vision and shape its culture. That’s why every single business decision should be aligned with these values. A business without core values isn’t really a business.
This is how most companies use values (and generally stop here). Values empower leaders to simplify and focus. Whether someone manages 10 or 10,000 people, every leader needs to be clear on a few top priorities in order to achieve key goals. Values set strategic direction.
The best place to include a listing of principles is in a company’s Code of Business Conduct (COBC). It’s a governance issue. Principles are all about specifying, “ how we behave here .” Personally, I think you could take the list of 17 Common Values and turn them into a listing of principles, and then make this the COBC policy for a company.
VALUES. The term Values is the most common one, where leaders use these in four different ways: Values define acceptable behavior . This is how most companies use values (and generally stop here). Values empower leaders to simplify and focus.
Values set strategic direction. Values help all stakeholders understand what is produced or provided, how it gets done, who is involved, where it belongs, and when and why it matters. Values build competitive differentiation.
When Jim Collins wrote in his book Good to Great that Great organizations embrace values, in essence he was highlighting that they use values in all of these four ways. Another way to think of values is that they are all about helping leaders determine and manage priorities.
A Statement of Belief helps stakeholders understand all decisions and behaviors through the right lens.